(There
is a conflicting time, which offers Virgo rising instead of Scorpio.
If true, that which is written below will have to be modified.)

(Ascendant, Scorpio (or now more probably Virgo) with Uranus also in Scorpio; Sun in Aquarius;
Moon in Sagittarius; Mercury and Saturn in Capricorn; Venus in Pisces
conjunct Pluto; Mars in Aries; Jupiter in Gemini; Neptune in Sagittarius)

Charles Dickens was the most popular English novelist of the nineteenth
century, and perhaps the greatest of all the English novelists. Some
of his best works include Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, and
A Tale of Two Cities. The energy of Love-Wisdom is profoundly
present. The theme of redemption through love emerges persistently;
love (Venus and Jupiter) and sacrifice (Pluto conjunct Venus) are understood
as the best ways to conquer the Scorpionic Hydra. Venus (with its second
ray component) exalted in second ray Pisces, only strengthens the compassion
which underlies Dickens’ stories. Love redeems, and Ebenezer Scrooge
is, from the esoteric perspective, “born again” as a “new man in Christ”
on Christmas morning. The soul always triumphs (Scorpio).

The broad humanitarian side of Aquarius (the energy of “universal love”)
emerges here. The largesse of Dickens’s approach to the human character
is indicated by broad and benevolent Jupiter standing alone in second
ray Gemini in the house of penetrating psychological understanding,
H8. Dickens’ view of human nature was realistic (Mercury and Saturn
in Capricorn) but generous and full of loving-understanding.

Beneath the description of sordid and unhappy conditions, there
is the optimism of his Sagittarian Moon, and his singleton Jupiter.
To read his novels is a transformative experience (Uranus in the first
house in Scorpio)—transformative through an access to a great flow of
heart energy.

Along with the energy of the second ray, the fourth ray stream of energy
can certainly be detected. The drama between good and evil, light and
dark is ever present—but at length, there is, in true fourth manner,
victory.

A
day wasted on others is not wasted on one's self.
(Sun in Aquarius)

A lady of what is
commonly called an uncertain temper - a phrase which being interpreted
signifies a temper tolerably certain to make everybody more or less
uncomfortable.

A loving heart is
the truest wisdom.
(Venus in Pisces)

A wonderful fact
to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that
profound secret and mystery to every other.
(Scorpio Ascendant)

Anything for the
quick life, as the man said when he took the situation at the lighthouse.

Electric communication
will never be a substitute for the face of someone who with their soul
encourages another person to be brave and true.
(Mars in Aries)

I have known a vast
quantity of nonsense talked about bad men not looking you in the face.
Don't trust that conventional idea. Dishonesty will stare honesty out
of countenance any day in the week, if there is anything to be got by
it.
(Scorpio Ascendant)

I never could have
done what I have done without the habits of punctuality, order, and
diligence, without the determination to concentrate myself on one subject
at a time.
(Saturn in Capricorn)

I only ask for information.

I only ask to be
free. The butterflies are free.
(Moon in Sagittarius)

I will honor Christmas
in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.

If there were no
bad people, there would be no good lawyers.

If you could see
my legs when I take my boots off, you'd form some idea of what unrequited
affection is.

In the little world
in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there
is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice.

It is a pleasant
thing to reflect upon, and furnishes a complete answer to those who
contend for the gradual degeneration of the human species, that every
baby born into the world is a finer one than the last.

It opens the lungs,
washes the countenance, exercises the eyes, and softens down the temper;
so cry away.

It was the best
of times, it was the worst of times.

Keep up appearances
whatever you do.

Let us be moral.
Let us contemplate existence.

Life is made of
ever so many partings welded together.

Minds, like bodies,
will often fall into a pimpled, ill-conditioned state from mere excess
of comfort.
Charles Dickens

Most men are individuals
no longer so far as their business, its activities, or its moralities
are concerned. They are not units but fractions.

Nature gives to
every time and season some beauties of its own; and from morning to
night, as from the cradle to the grave, it is but a succession of changes
so gentle and easy that we can scarcely mark their progress.

No one is useless
in this world who lightens the burden of it to anyone else.
(Sun in Aquarius)

Reflect upon your
present blessings, of which every man has plenty; not on your past misfortunes
of which all men have some.

Regrets are the
natural property of grey hairs.

Renunciation remains
sorrow, though a sorrow borne willingly.

There are strings
in the human heart that had better not be vibrated.
(Venus conjunct Pluto in Pisces)

There is nothing
so strong or safe in an emergency of life as the simple truth.
(Moon in Sagittarius)

This is a world
of action, and not for moping and droning in.
(Mars in Aries)

To conceal anything
from those to whom I am attached, is not in my nature. I can never close
my lips where I have opened my heart.
(Venus in Pisces. Jupiter in Gemini)

Vices are sometimes
only virtues carried to excess!

We are so very 'umble.

Whatever I have
tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do it well; whatever
I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself completely; in great
aims and in small I have always thoroughly been in earnest.
(Scorpio Ascendant)

Charles John Huffam
Dickens (7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870), pen-name "Boz",
was an English novelist. During his career Dickens achieved massive
worldwide popularity, winning acclaim for his rich storytelling and
memorable characters. Considered one of the English language's greatest
writers, he was the foremost novelist of the Victorian era as well as
a vigorous social campaigner.

Later critics, beginning
with George Gissing and G.K. Chesterton, championed his mastery of prose,
his endless invention of memorable characters and his powerful social
sensibilities. Yet he also received criticism from his more rarefied
readers, including George Henry Lewes, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf,
who list faults such as sentimentality, unrealistic events and grotesque
characters[1].

The popularity of
his novels and short stories during his lifetime and to the present
is demonstrated by the fact that none has ever gone out of print. Dickens
wrote serialised novels, which was the usual format for fiction at the
time, and each new part of his stories would be eagerly anticipated
by the reading public. He is regarded by many as the greatest writer
of his time.

Life
Dickens was born in Portsmouth, Hampshire, to John Dickens (1786–1851),
a naval pay clerk, and his wife Elizabeth Dickens née Barrow
(1789–1863). When he was five, the family moved to Chatham, Kent.
When he was ten, the family relocated to 16 Bayham Street, Camden Town
in London. His early years were an idyllic time. He thought himself
then as a "very small and not-over-particularly-taken-care-of boy"[2].
He spent his time outdoors, reading voraciously with a particular fondness
for the picaresque novels of Tobias Smollett and Henry Fielding. He
talked later in life of his extremely poignant memories of childhood
and his continuing photographic memory of people and events that helped
bring his fiction to life. His family was moderately well-off, and he
received some education at a private school but all that changed when
his father, after spending too much money entertaining and retaining
his social position, was imprisoned for debt. At the age of twelve,
Dickens was deemed old enough to work and began working for ten hours
a day in Warren's boot-blacking factory, located near the present Charing
Cross railway station. He spent his time pasting labels on the jars
of thick polish and earned six shillings a week. With this money, he
had to pay for his lodging and help to support his family, most of whom
were living with his father, who was incarcerated in the nearby Marshalsea
debtors' prison.

After a few months
his family was able to leave the Marshalsea but their financial situation
only improved some time later, partly due to money inherited from his
father's family. His mother did not immediately remove Charles from
the boot-blacking factory, which was owned by a relation of hers. Dickens
never forgave his mother for this, and resentment of his situation and
the conditions under which working-class people lived became major themes
of his works. As Dickens wrote in David Copperfield, judged to be his
most clearly autobiographical novel, "I had no advice, no counsel,
no encouragement, no consolation, no assistance, no support, of any
kind, from anyone, that I can call to mind, as I hope to go to heaven!"
In May 1827, Dickens began work as a law clerk, a junior office position
with potential to become a lawyer. He did not like the law as a profession
and after a short time as a court stenographer he became a journalist,
reporting parliamentary debate and travelling Britain by stagecoach
to cover election campaigns. His journalism formed his first collection
of pieces Sketches by Boz and he continued to contribute to and edit
journals for much of his life. In his early twenties he made a name
for himself with his first novel, The Pickwick Papers.

On 2 April 1836,
he married Catherine Thompson Hogarth (1816–1879), with whom he
was to have ten children, and set up home in Bloomsbury. Their children
were:

Charles Culliford
Boz Dickens (6 January 1837–1896).
Mary Angela Dickens (6 March 1838–1896).
Kate Macready Dickens (29 October 1839–1929).
Walter Landor Dickens (8 February 1841–1863). Died in India.
Francis Jeffrey Dickens (15 January 1844–1886).
Alfred D'Orsay Tennyson Dickens (28 October 1845–1912).
Sydney Smith Haldimand Dickens (18 April 1847–1872).
(Sir) Henry Fielding Dickens (15 January 1849–1933). He was the
grandfather of the writer Monica Dickens.
Dora Annie Dickens (16 August 1850–April 1851).
Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens (13 March 1852–23 January 1902).
He migrated to Australia, and became a member of the New South Wales
state parliament. He died in Moree, NSW.
In the same year, he accepted the job of editor of Bentley's Miscellany,
a position he would hold until 1839 when he fell out with the owner.
Two other journals in which Dickens would be a major contributor were
Household Words and All the Year Round. In 1842, he travelled together
with his wife to the United States; the trip is described in the short
travelogue American Notes and is also the basis of some of the episodes
in Martin Chuzzlewit. Shortly thereafter, he began to show interest
in Unitarian Christianity, although he remained an Anglican, at least
nominally, for the rest of his life.[1] Dickens' writings were extremely
popular in their day and were read extensively. In 1856, his popularity
allowed him to buy Gad's Hill Place. This large house in Higham, Kent,
was very special to the author as he had walked past it as a child and
had dreamed of living in it. The area was also the scene of some of
the events of Shakespeare's Henry IV, part 1 and this literary connection
pleased Dickens.

Dickens separated
from his wife in 1858. In Victorian times, divorce was almost unthinkable,
particularly for someone as famous as he was. He continued to maintain
her in a house for the next twenty years until she died. Although they
were initially happy together, Catherine did not seem to share quite
the same boundless energy for life which Dickens had. Her job of looking
after their ten children and the pressure of living with and keeping
house for a world-famous novelist certainly did not help. Catherine's
sister Georgina moved in to help her, but there were rumours that Charles
was romantically linked to his sister-in-law. An indication of his marital
dissatisfaction was when, in 1855, he went to meet his first love, Maria
Beadnell. Maria was by this time married as well, but she seemed to
have fallen short of Dickens' romantic memory of her.

On 9 June 1865,
while returning from France to see Ellen Ternan, Dickens was involved
in the Staplehurst rail crash in which the first seven carriages of
the train plunged off of a bridge that was being repaired. The only
first-class carriage to remain on the track was the one in which Dickens
was berthed. Dickens spent some time tending the wounded and the dying
before rescuers arrived. Before finally leaving, he remembered the unfinished
manuscript for Our Mutual Friend, and he returned to his carriage to
retrieve it. Typical of Dickens, he later used the terrible experience
to write his short ghost story The Signal-Man in which the protagonist
has a premonition of a rail crash.

Dickens managed
to avoid an appearance at the inquiry into the crash, as it would have
become known that he was travelling that day with Ellen Ternan and her
mother, which could have caused a scandal. Ellen, an actress, had been
Dickens' companion since the break-up of his marriage, and, as he had
met her in 1857, she was most likely the ultimate reason for that break-up.
She continued to be his companion, and likely mistress, until his death.
The dimensions of the affair were unknown until the publication of Dickens
and Daughter, a book about Dickens' relationship with his daughter Kate,
in 1939. Kate Dickens worked with author Gladys Storey on the book prior
to her death in 1929, and alleged that Dickens and Ternan had a son
who died in infancy, though no contemporary evidence exists.

Autobiographical
elements
All authors incorporate autobiographical elements in their fiction,
but with Dickens this is very noticeable, even though he took pains
to cover up what he considered his shameful, lowly past. David Copperfield
is one of the most clearly autobiographical but the scenes from Bleak
House of interminable court cases and legal arguments could only come
from a journalist who has had to report them. Dickens' own family was
sent to prison for poverty, a common theme in many of his books, and
the detailed depiction of life in the Marshalsea prison in Little Dorrit
is due to Dickens' own experiences of the institution. Little Nell in
The Old Curiosity Shop is thought to represent Dickens' sister-in-law,
Nicholas Nickleby's father and Wilkins Micawber are certainly Dickens'
own father, just as Mrs Nickleby and Mrs Micawber are similar to his
mother. The snobbish nature of Pip from Great Expectations also has
some affinity to the author himself. Dickens may have drawn on his childhood
experiences, but he was also ashamed of them and would not reveal that
this was where he got his realistic accounts of squalor. Very few knew
the details of his early life until six years after his death when John
Forster published a biography on which Dickens had collaborated. A shameful
past in Victorian times could taint reputations, just as it did for
some of his characters, and this may have been Dickens' own fear.

Legacy

A scene from Oliver Twist, from an early 20th Century edition.Charles
Dickens was a well-known personality and his novels were immensely popular
during his lifetime. His first full novel, The Pickwick Papers (1837),
brought him immediate fame and this continued right through his career.
He maintained a high quality in all his writings and, although rarely
departing greatly from his typical "Dickensian" method of
always attempting to write a great "story" in a somewhat conventional
manner (the dual narrators of Bleak House are a notable exception),
he experimented with varied themes, characterisations and genres. Some
of these experiments were more successful than others and the public's
taste and appreciation of his many works have varied over time. He was
usually keen to give his readers what they wanted, and the monthly or
weekly publication of his works in episodes meant that the books could
change as the story proceeded at the whim of the public. A good example
of this are the American episodes in Martin Chuzzlewit which were put
in by Dickens in response to lower than normal sales of the earlier
chapters. In Our Mutual Friend the inclusion of the character of Riah
was a positive portrayal of a Jewish character after he was criticised
for the depiction of Fagin in Oliver Twist.

His popularity has
waned little since his death and he is still one of the best known and
most read of English authors. At least 180 motion pictures and TV adaptations
based on Dickens' works help confirm his success. Many of his works
were adapted for the stage during his own lifetime and as early as 1913
a silent film of The Pickwick Papers was made. His characters were often
so memorable that they took on a life of their own outside his books.
Gamp became a slang expression for an umbrella from the character Mrs
Gamp and Pickwickian, Pecksniffian and Gradgrind all entered dictionaries
due to Dickens' original portraits of such characters who were quixotic,
hypocritical or emotionlessly logical. Sam Weller, the carefree and
irreverent valet of The Pickwick Papers, was an early superstar, perhaps
better known than his author at first. It is likely that A Christmas
Carol is his best-known story, with new adaptations almost every year.
It is also the most-filmed of Dickens' stories, many versions dating
from the early years of cinema. This simple morality tale with both
pathos and its theme of redemption, for many, sums up the true meaning
of Christmas and eclipses all other Yuletide stories in not only popularity,
but in adding archetypal figures (Scrooge, Tiny Tim, the Christmas ghosts)
to the Western cultural consciousness. A Christmas Carol was written
by Dickens in an attempt forestall financial disaster as a result of
flagging sales of his novel Martin Chuzzlewit. Years later, Dickens
shared that he was "deeply affected" in writing A Christmas
Carol and the novel rejuvenated his career as a renowned author.

At a time when Britain
was the major economic and political power of the world, Dickens highlighted
the life of the forgotten poor and disadvantaged at the heart of empire.
Through his journalism he campaigned on specific issues — such
as sanitation and the workhouse — but his fiction was probably
all the more powerful in changing public opinion in regard to class
inequalities. He often depicted the exploitation and repression of the
poor and condemned the public officials and institutions that allowed
such abuses to exist. His most strident indictment of this condition
is in Hard Times (1854), Dickens' only novel-length treatment of the
industrial working class. In that work, he uses both vitriol and satire
to illustrate how this marginalised social stratum was termed "Hands"
by the factory owners, that is, not really "people" but rather
only appendages of the machines that they operated. His writings inspired
others, in particular journalists and political figures, to address
such problems of class oppression. For example, the prison scenes in
Little Dorrit and The Pickwick Papers were prime movers in having the
Marshalsea and Fleet Prisons shut down. As Karl Marx said, Dickens,
and the other novelists of Victorian England, "…issued to
the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by
all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together…"[3].
The exceptional popularity of his novels, even those with socially oppositional
themes (Bleak House, 1853; Little Dorrit, 1857; Our Mutual Friend, 1865)
underscored not only his almost preternatural ability to create compelling
storylines and unforgettable characters, but also insured that the Victorian
public confronted issues of social justice that had commonly been ignored.

His fiction, with
often vivid descriptions of life in nineteenth-century England, has
inaccurately and anachronistically come to globally symbolise Victorian
society (1837–1901) as uniformly "Dickensian," when
in fact, his novels' time span is from the 1770s to the 1860s. In the
decade following his death in 1870, a more intense degree of socially
and philosophically pessimistic perspectives invested British fiction;
such themes were in contrast to the religious faith that ultimately
held together even the bleakest of Dickens' novels. Later Victorian
novelists such as Thomas Hardy and George Gissing were influenced by
Dickens, but their works display a lack or absence of religious belief
and portray characters caught up by social forces (primarily via lower-class
conditions) that steer them to tragic ends beyond their control. Samuel
Butler (1835–1902), most notably in The Way of All Flesh (1885;
pub. 1903), also questioned religious faith but in a more upper-class
milieu.

Novelists continue
to be influenced by his books; for example, such disparate current writers
as Anne Rice, Tom Wolfe and John Irving evidence direct Dickensian connections.
Humorist James Finn Garner even wrote a tongue-in-cheek "politically
correct" version of A Christmas Carol. Ultimately, Dickens stands
today as a brilliant, innovative and sometimes flawed novelist whose
stories and characters have become not only literary archetypes but
also part of the public imagination.

Charles Dickens
Biography

DICKENS, CHARLES
JOHN HUFFAM (1812—1870), English novelist, was born on the 7th
of February 1812 at a house in the Mile End Terrace, Commercial Road,
Landport (Portsea)—a house which was opened as a Dickens Museum
on 22nd July 2904. His father John Dickens (d. 1851), a clerk in the
navy-pay office on a salary of £80 a year, and stationed for the
time being at Portsmouth, had married in 1809 Elizabeth, daughter of
Thomas Barrow, and she bore him a family of eight children, Charles
being the second. In the winter of 1814 the family moved from Portsea
in the snow, as he remembered, to London, and lodged for a time near
the Middlesex hospital. The country of the novelist’s childhood,
however, was the kingdom of Kent, where the family was established in
proximity to the dockyard at Chatham from 1816 to 1821. He looked upon
himself in later years as a man of Kent, and his capital abode as that
in Ordnance Terrace, or 18 St Mary’s Place, Chatham, amid surroundings
classified in Mr Pickwick’s notes as “ appearing “to
be soldiers, sailors, Jews, chalk, shrimps, officers and dockyard men.
He fell into a family the general tendency of which was to go down in
the world, during one of its easier periods (John Dickens was now fifth
clerk on £250 a year), and he always regarded himself as belonging
by right to a comfortable, genteel, lower middleclass stratum of society.
His mother taught him to read; to his father he appeared very early
in the light of a young prodigy, and by him Charles was made to sit
on a tall chair and warble popular ballads, or even to tell stories
and anecdotes for the benefit of fellow-clerks in the office.

John Dickens, however,
had a small collection of books which were kept in a little room upstairs
that led out of Charles’s own, and in this attic the boy found
his true literary instructors in Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle,
Humphry Clinker, Tom Jones, The Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, and
Robinson Crusoe. The story of how he played at the characters in these
books and sustained his idea of Roderick Random for a month at a stretch
is picturesquely told in David Copperfield. Here as well as in his first
and last books and in what many regard as his best, Great Expectations,
Dickens returns with unabated fondness and mastery to the surroundings
of his childhood. From seven to nine years he was at a school kept in
Clover Lane, Chatham, by a Baptist minister named William Giles, who
gave him Goldsmith’s Bee as a keepsake when the call to Somerset
House necessitated the removal of the family from Rochester to a shabby
house in Bayham Street, Camden Town. At the very moment when a consciousness
of capacity was beginning to plump his youthful ambitions, the whole
flattering dream vanished and left not a rack behind. Happiness and
Chatham had been left behind together, and Charles was about to enter
a school far sterner and also far more instructive than that in Clover
Lane. The family income had been first decreased and then mortgaged;
the creditors of the “prodigal father” would not give him
time; John Dickens was consigned to the Marshalsea; Mrs Dickens started
an “Educational Establishment “ as a forlorn hope in Upper
Gower Street; and Charles, who had helped his mother with the children,
blacked the boots, carried things to the pawnshop and done other menial
work, was now sent out to earn his owfi living as a young hand in a
blacking warehouse, at Old Hungerford Stairs, on a salary of six shillings
a week. He tied, trimmed and labelled blacking pots for over a year,
dining off a saveloy and a slice of pudding, consorting with two very
rough boys, Bob Fagin and P01 Green, and sleeping in an attic in Little
College Street, Camden Town, in the house of Mrs Roylance (Pipchin),
while on Sunday he spent the day with his parents in their comfortable
prison, where they had the services of a” marchioness “imported
from the Chatham workhouse.

Already consumed
by ambition, proud, sensitive and on his dignity to an extent not uncommon
among boys of talent, he felt his position keenly, and in later years
worked himself up into a passion of self-pity in connexion with the
“degradation” and “humiliation” of this episode.
The two years of childish hardship which ate like iron into his soul
were obviously of supreme importance in the growth of the novelist.
Recollections of the streets and the prison and its purlieus supplied
him with a store of literary material upon which he drew through all
the years of his best activity. And the bitterness of such an experience
was not prolonged sufficiently to become sour. From 1824 to 1826, having
been rescued by a family quarrel and by a windfall in the shape of a
legacy to his father, from the warehouse, he spent two years at an academy
known as Wellington House, at the corner of Granby Street and the Hampstead
Road (the lighter traits of which are reproduced in Salem House), and
was there known as a merry and rather mischievous boy. Fortunately he
learned nothing there to compromise the results of previous instruction.
His father had now emerged from the Marshalsea and was seeking employment
as a parliamentary reporter. A Gray’s Inn solicitor with whom
he had had dealings was attracted by the bright, clever look of Charles,
and took him into his office as a boy at a salary of thirteen and sixpence
(rising to fifteen shillings) a week. He remained in Mr Blackmore’s
office from May 1827 to November 1828, but he had lost none of his eager
thirst for distinction, and spent all his spare time mastering Gurney’s
short~hand and reading early and late at the British Museum.

A more industrious
apprentice in the lower grades of the literary profession has never
been known, and the consciousness of opportunities used to the most
splendid advantage can hardly have been ahient from the man. who was
shortly to take his place at the head of it as if to the manner born.
Lowten and Guppy, and Swiveller had been observed from this office lad’s
stool; he was now greatly to widen his area of study as a reporter in
Doctors’ Commons and various police courts, including Bow Street,
working all day at law and much of the night at shorthand. Some one
asked John Dickens, during the first eager period of curiosity as to
the man behind “Pickwick,” where his son Charles was educated.
“ Well really,” said the prodigal father, “he may
be said—haw—haw—to have educated himself.”

He was one of the
most rapid and accurate reporters in London when, at nineteen years
of age, in 1831, he realized his immediate ambition and “entered
the gallery” as parliamentary reporter to the True Sun. Later
he was reporter to the Mirror of Parliament and then to the Morning
Chronicle. Several of his earliest letters are concerned with his exploits
as a reporter, and allude to the experiences he had, travelling fifteen
miles an hour and being upset in almost every description of known vehicle
in various parts of Britain between 1831 and 1836. The family was now
living in Bentwick Street, Manchester Square, but John Dickens was still
no infrequent inmate of the sponging-houses. With all the accessories
of these places of entertainment his son had grown to be excessively
familiar. Writing about 1832 to his school friend Tom Mitton, Dickens
tells him that his father has been arrested at the suit of a wine firm,
and begs him go over to Cursitor Street and see what can be done. On
another occasion of a paternal disappearance he observes: “I own
that his absence does not give me any great uneasiness, knowing how
apt he is to get out of the way when anything goes wrong.” In
yet another letter he asks for a loan of four shillings.

in the meanwhile,
however, he had commenced author in a more creative sense by penning
some sketches of contemporary London life, such as he had attempted
in his school days in imitation of the sketches published in the London
and other magazines of that day. The first of these appeared in the
December number of the Old Monthly Magazine for 1833. By the following
August, when the signature “Boz” was first given, five of
these sketches had appeared. By the end of 1834 we find him settled
in rooms in Furnival’s Inn, and a little later his salary on the
Morning Chronicle was raised, owing to the intervention of one of its
chiefs, George Hogarth, the father of (in addition to six sons) eight
charming daughters, to one of whom, Catherine, Charles was engaged to
be married before the year was out. Clearly as his career now seemed
designated, he was at this time or a little before it coquetting very
seriously with the stage: but circumstances were rapidly to determine
another stage in his career. A year before Queen Victoria’s accession
appeared in two volumes Sketches by Boz, Illustrative of Everyday Life
and Everyday People. The book came from a prentice hand, but like the
little tract on the Puritan abuse of the Sabbath entitled “ Sunday
under three Heads” which appeared a few months later, it contains
in germ all, or almost all, the future Dickens. Glance at the headings
of the pages. Here we have the Beadle and all connected with him, London
streets, theatres, shows, the pawnshop, Doctors’ Commons, Christmas,
Newgate, coaching, the river. Here comes a satirical picture of parliament,
fun made of cheap snobbery, a rap on the knuckles of sectarianism. And
what could be more prophetic than the title of the opening chapter—
Our Parish? With the Parish—a large one indeed—Dickens to
the end concerned himself; he began with a rapid survey of his whole
field, hinting at all he might accomp]ish, indicating the limits he
was not to pass. This year was to be still more momentous to Dickens,
for, on the 2nd of April 1836, he was mairied to George Hogarth’s
eldest daughter Catherine. He seems to have fallen in love with the
daughters collectively, and, judging by subsequent events, it has been
suggested that perhaps he married the wrong one. His wife’s sister
Mary was the romance of his early married life, and another sister,
Georgina, was the dearest friend of his last ten years.

A few days before
the marriage, just two months after the appearance of the Sketches,
the first part of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club was announced.
One of the chief vogues of the day was the issue of humorous, sporting
or anecdotal novels in parts, with plates, and some of the best talent
of the day, represented by Ainsworth, Bulwer, Marryat, Maxwell, Egan,
Hook and Surtees, had been pressed into this kind of enterprise. The
publishers of the day had not been slow to perceive Dickens’s
aptitude for this species of “letterpress.” A member of
the firm of Chapman & Hall called upon him at Furnival’s Inn
in December 1835 with a proposal that he should write about a Nimrod
Club of amateur sportsmen, foredoomed to perpetual ignominies, while
the comic illustrations were to be etched by Seymour, a well-known rival
of Cruikshank (the illustrator of Boz). The offer was too tempting for
Dickens to r~use, but he changed the idea from a club of Cockney sportsmen
to that of a club of eccentric peripatetics, on the sensible grounds,
first that sporting sketches were stale, and, secondly, that he knew
nothing worth speaking of about sport. The first seven pictures appeared
with the signature of Seymour and the letterpress of Dickens. Before
the eighth picture appeared Seymour had blown his brains Out. After
a brief interval of Buss, Dickens obtained the services of Hablot K.
Browne, known to all as “Phiz.” Author and illustrator were
as well suited to one another and to the common creation of a unique
thing as Gilbert and Sullivan. Having early got rid of the sporting
element, Dickens found himself at once. The subject exactly suited his
knowledge, his skill in arranging incidents—nay, his very limitations
too. No modern book is so incalculable. We ccmmence laughing heartily
at Pickwick and his troupe. The laugh becomes kindlier. We are led on
through a tangle of adventure, never dreaming what is before us. The
landscape changes: Pickwick becomes the symbol of kindheartedness, simplicity
and innocent levity. Suddenly in the Fleet Prison a deeper note is struck.
The medley of human relationships, the loneliness, the mystery and sadness
of human destinies are fathomed. The tragedy of human life is revealed
to us amid its most farcical elements. The droll and laughable figure
of the hero is transfigured by the kindliness of human sympathy into
a beneficent and bespectacled angel in shorts and gaiters. By defying
accepted rules, Dickens had transcended the limited sphere hitherto
allotted to his art: he had produced a book to be enshrined henceforth
in the inmost hearts of all sorts and conditions of his countrymen,
and had definitely enlarged the boundaries of English humour and English
fiction. As for Mr Pickwick, he is a fairy like Puck or Santa Claus,
while his creator is “the last of the mythologists and perhaps
the greatest.”

When The Pickwick
Papers appeared in book form at the close of 1837 Dickens’s popular
reputation was made. From the appearance of Sam Weller in part v. the
universal hunger for the monthly parts had risen to a furore. The book
was promptly translated into French and German. The author bad received
little assistance from press or critics, he had no influential connexions,
his class of subjects was such as to “expose him’ at the
outset to the fatal objections of vulgarity,” yet in less than
six months from the appearance of the first number, as the Quarterly
Review almost ruefully admits, the whole reading world was talking about
the Pickwickians. The names of Winkle, Wardle, Weller, Jingle, Snodgrass,
Dodson & Fogg, were as familiar as household words. Pickwick chintzes
figured in the linendrapers’ windows, and Pickwick cigars in every
tobacconist’s; Weller corduroys became the stock-in-trade of every
breeches-maker; Boz cabs might be seen rattling through the streets,
and the portrait of the author of Pelham and Crichton was scraped down
to make way for that of the new popular favourite on the omnibuses.
A new and original genius had suddenly sprung up, there was no denying
it, even though, as the Quarterly concluded, “it required no gift
of prophecy to foretell his fate—he has risen like a rocket and
he will come down. like the stick.” It would have needed a very
emphatic gift of prophecy indeed to foretell that Dickens’s reputation
would have gone on rising until at the present day (after one sharp
fall, which reached an extreme about 1887) it stands higher than it
has ever stood before.

Dickens’s
assumption of the literary purple was as amazing as anything else about
him. Accepting the homage of the luminaries of the literary, artistic
and polite worlds as if it had been his natural due, he arranges for
the settlement of his family, decrees, like another Edmund Kean, that
his son is to go to Eton, carries on the most complicated negotiations
with his publishers and editors, presides and orates with incomparable
force at innumerable banquets, public and private, arranges elaborate
villegiatures in the country, at the seaside, in France or in Italy,
arbitrates in public on every topic, political, ethical, artistic, social
or literary, entertains and legislates for an increasingly large domestic
circle, both juvenile and adult, rules himself and his time-table with
a rod of iron. In his letter-writing alone, Dickens did a life’s
literary work. Nowadays no one thinks of writing such letters; that
is to say, letters of such length and detail, for the quality is Dickens’s
own. He evidently enjoyed this use of the pen. Page after page of Forster’s
Life (750 pages in the Letters edited by his daughter and sister-in-law)
is occupied with transcription from private correspondence, and never
a line of this but is thoroughly worthy of print and preservation. If
he makes a tour in any part of the British Isles, he writes a full description
of all he sees, of everything that happens, and writes it with such
gusto, such mirth, such strokes of fine picturing, as appear in no other
private letters ever given to the public. Naturally buoyant in all circumstances,
a holiday gave him the exhilaration of a schoolboy. See how he writes
from Cornwall, when on a trip with two or three friends, in 1843. “Heavens!
if you could have seen the necks of bottles, distracting in their immense
variety of shape, peering out of the carriage pockets! If you could
have witnessed the deep devotion of the post-boys, the maniac glee of
the waiters! If you could have followed us into the earthy old churches
we visited, and into the strange caverns on the gloomy seashore, and
down into the depths of mines, and up to the tops of giddy heights,
where the unspeakably green water was roaring, I don’t know how
many hundred feet below. . . . I never laughed in my life as I did on
this journey. It would have done you good to hear me. I was choking
and gasping and bursting the buckles off the back of my stock, all the
way. And Stanfield “—the painter— “got into
such apoplectic entanglements that we were obliged to beat him on the
back with portmanteaus before we could recover him.”

The animation of
Dickens’s look would attract the attention of any one, anywhere.
His figure was not that of an Adonis, but his brightness made him the
centre and pivot of every society he was in. The keenness and vivacity
of his eye combined with his inordinate appetite for life to give the
unique quality to all that he wrote. His instrument is that of the direct,
sinewy English of Smollett, combined with much of the humorous grace
of Goldsmith (his two favourite authors), but modernized to a certain
extent under the influence of Washington Irving, Sydney Smith, Jeffrey,
Lamb, and other writers of the London Magazine. He taught himself to
speak French and Italian, but he could have read little in any language.
His ideas were those of the inchoate and insular liberalism of the ‘thirties.
His unique force in literature he was to owe to no supreme artistic
or intellectual quality, but almost entirely to his inordinate gift
of observation, his sympathy with the humble, his power over the emotions
and his incomparable endowment of unalloyed human fun.

To contemporaries
he was not so much a man as an institution, at the very mention of whose
name faces were puckered with grins or wreathed in smiles. To many his
work was a revelation, the revelation of a new world and one far better
than their own. And his influence went further than this in the direction
of revolution or revival. It gave what were then universally referred
to as “ the lower orders “ a new sense of self-respect,
a new feeling of citizenship. Like the defiance of another Luther, or
the Declaration of a new Independence, it emitted a fresh ray of hope
across the firmament. He did for the whole English-speaking race what
Burns had done for Scotland—he gave it a new conceit of itself.
He knew what a people wanted and he told what he knew. He could do this
better than anybody else because his mind was theirs. He shared many
of their “ great useless virtues,” among which generosity
ranks before justice, and sympathy before truth, even though, true to
his middle-class vein, he exalts piety, chastity and honesty in a manner
somewhat alien to the mind of the low-bred man. This is what makes Dickens
such a demigod and his public success such a marvel, and this also is
why any exclusively literary criticism of his work is bound to be so
inadequate. It should also help us to make the necessary allowances
for the man. Dickens, even the Dickens of legend that we know, is far
from perfect.

The Dickens of reality
to which Time may furnish a nearer approximation is far less perfect.
But when we consider the corroding influence of adulation, and the intoxication
of unbridled success, we cannot but wonder at the relatively high level
of moderation and self-control that Dickens almost invariably observed.
Mr G. K. Chesterton remarks suggestively that Dickens had all his life
the faults of the little boy who is kept up too late at night. He is
overwrought by happiness to the verge of exasperation, and yet as a
matter of fact he does keep on the right side of the breaking point.
The specific and curative in his case was the work in which he took
such anxiou~ pride, and such unmitigated delight. He revelled in punctual
and regular work; at his desk he was often in the highest spirits. Behold
how he pictured himself, one day at Broadstairs, where he was writing
Chuzzlewit. “In a baywindow in a one-pair sits, from nine o’clock
to one, a gentleman with rather long hair and no neckcloth, who writes
and grins, as if he thought he was very funny indeed. At one he disappears,
presently emerges from a bathing-machine, and may be seen, a kind of
salmon-colour porpoise, splashing about in the ocean. After that, he
may be viewed in another bay-window on the’ ground-floor eating
a strong lunch; and after that, walking a dozen miles or so, or lying
on his back on the sand reading a book. Nobody bothers him, unless they
know he is disposed to be talked to, and I am told he is very comfortable
indeed. He’s as brown as a berry, and they do say he is as good
as a small fortune to the innkeeper, who sells beer and cold punch.”
Here is the secret of such work as that of Dickens; it is done with
delight— done (in a sense) easily, done with the mechanism of
mind and body in splendid order. Even so did Scott write; though more
rapidly and with less conscious care: his chapter finished before the
world had got up to breakfast. Later, Dickens produced novels less excellent
with much more of mental strain. The effects of age could not have shown
themselves so soon, but for the unfortunate loss of energy involved
in his non-literary labours.

While the public
were still rejoicing in the first sprightly runnings of the “new
humour,” the humorist set to work desperately on the grim scenes
of Oliver Twist, the story of a parish orphan, the nucleus of which
had already seen the light in his Sketches. The early scenes are of
a harrowing reality, despite the germ of forced pathos which the observant
reader may detect in the pitiful parting between Oliver and little Dick;
but what will strike every reader at once in this book is the directness
and power of the English style, so nervous and unadorned from its unmistakable
clearness and vigour Dickens was to travel far as time went on. But
the full effect of the old simplicity is felt in such masterpieces of
descriptidn as the drive of Oliver and Sikes to Chertsey, the condemned-cell
ecstasy of Fagin, or the unforgettable first encounter between Oliver
and the Artful Dodger. Before November 1837 had ended, Charles Dickens
entered on an engagement to write a successor to Pickwick on similar
lines of publication. Oliver Twist was then in mid-career; a Life of
Grimaldi and Barnaby Rudge were already covenanted for. Dickens forged
ahead with the new tale of Nicholas Nickleby and was justified by the
results, for its sale far surpassed even that of Pickwick. As a conception
it is one of his weakest. An unmistakably 18th-century character pervades
it. Some of the vignettes are among the most piquant and besetting ever
written. Large parts of it are totally unobserved conventional melodrama;
but the Portsmouth Theatre and Dotheboys Hall and Mrs Nickleby (based
to some extent, it is thought, upon Miss Bates in Emma, but also upon
the author’s Mamma) live for ever as Dickens conceived them in
the pages of Nicholas Nickleby.

Having got rid of
Nicholas Nickleby and resigned his editorship of Bentley’s Miscellany,
in which Oliver Twist originally appeared, Dickens conceived the idea
of a weekly periodical to be issued as Master Humphrey’s Clock,
to comprise short stories, essays and miscellaneous papers, after the
model of Addison’s Spectator. To make the weekly numbers “go,”
he introduced Mr Pickwick, Sam Weller and his father in friendly intercourse.
But the public requisitioned “a story,” and in No. ~ he
had to brace himself up to give them one. Thus was commenced The Old
Curiosity Shop, which was continued with slight interruptions, and followed
by Barnaby Rudge. For the first time we find Dickens obsessed by a highly
complicated plot. The tonality achieved in The Old Curiosity Shop surpassed
anything he had attempted in this difficult vein, while the rich humour
of Dick Swiveller and the Marchioness, and the vivid portraiture of
the wandering Bohemians, attain the very highest level of Dickensian
drollery; but in the lamentable tale of Little Nell (though Landor and
Jeffrey thought the character-drawing of this infant comparable with
that of Cordelia), it is generally admitted that he committed an indecent
assault upon the emotions by exhibiting a veritable monster of piety
and longsuffering in a child of tender years. In Barnaby Rudge he was
manifestly affected by the influence of Scott, whose achievements he
always regarded with a touching veneration. The plot, again, is of the
utmost complexity, and Edgar Allan Poe (who predicted the conclusion)
must be one of the few persons who ever really mastered it. But few
of Dickens’s books are written in a more admirable style.

Master Humphrey’s
Clock concluded, Dickens started in 1842 on his first visit to America—an
episode hitherto without parallel in English literary history, for he
was received everywhere with popular acclamation as the representative
of a grand triumph of the English language and imagination, without
regard to distinctions of nationality. He offended the American public
grievously by a few words of frank description and a few quotations
of the advertisement columns of American papers illustrating the essential
barbarity of the old slave system (American Notes). Dickens was soon
pining for home—no English writer is more essentially and insularly
English in inspiration and aspiration than he is. He still brooded over
the perverseness of America on the copyright question, and in his next
book he took the opportunity of uttering a few of his impressions about
the objectionable sides of American democracy, the result being that
“all Yankee-doodle-dom blazed up like one universal soda bottle,”
as Carlyle said. Martin Clzuzzlewit (1843—1844) is important as
closing his great character period. His sève originale, as the
French would say, was by this time to a considerable extent exhausted,
and he had to depend more upon artistic elaboration, upon satires, upon
tours de force of description, upon romantic and ingenious contrivances.
But all these resources combined proved unequal to his powers as an
original observer of popular types, until he reinforced himself by autobiographic
reminiscence, as in David Copperfield and Great Expectations, the two
great books remaining to his later career.

After these two
masterpieces and the three wonderful books with which he made his debut,
we are inclined to rank Chuzzlewil. Nothing in Dickens is more admirably
seen and presented than Todgers’s, a bit of London particular
cut out with a knife. Mr Pecksniff and Mrs Gamp, Betsy Prig and “Mrs
Harris” have passed into the national language and life. The coach
journey, the windy autumn night, the stealthy trail of Jonas, the undertone
of tragedy in the Charity and Mercy and Chuffey episodes suggest a blending
of imaginative vision and physical penetration hardly seen elsewhere.
Two things are specially notable about this novel—the exceptional
care taken over it (as shown by the interlineations in the MS.) and
the caprice or nonchalance of the purchasing public, its sales being
far lower than those of any of its monthly predecessors.

At the dose of 1843,
to pay outstanding debts of his now lavish housekeeping, he wrote that
pioneer of Christmas numbers, that national benefit as Thackeray called
it, A Christmas Carol. It failed to realize his pecuniary anticipations,
and Dickens resolved upon a drastic policy of retrenchment and reform.
He would save expense by living abroad and would punish his publishers
by withdrawing his custom from them, at least for a time. Like everything
else upon which he ever determined, this resolution was carried out
with the greatest possible precision and despatch. In June 1844 he set
out for Marseilles with his now rapidly increasing family (the journey
cost him £200). In a villa on the outskirts of Genoa he wrote
The Chimes, which, during a brief excursion to London before Christmas,
he read to a select circle of friends (the germ of his subsequent lecture-audiences),
including Forster, Carlyle, Stanfield, Dyce, Maclise and Jerrold. He
was again in London in 1845, enjoying his favourite diversion of private
theatricals; and in January 1846 he experimented briefly as the editor
of a London morning paper—the Daily News. By early spring he was
back at Lausanne, writing his customary vivid letters to his friends,
craving as usual for London streets, commencing Dombey and Son, and
walking his fourteen miles daily. The success of Dombey and Son completely
rehabilitated the master’s finances, enabled him to return to
England, send his son to Eton and to begin to save money. Artistically
it is less satisfactory; it contains some of Dickens’s prime curios,
such as Cuttle, Bunsby, Toots, Bliniber, Pipchin, Mrs MacStinger and
young Biler; it contains also that masterpiece of sentimentality which
trembles upon the borderland of the sublime and the ridiculous, the
death of Paul Dombey (“ that sweet Paul,” as Jeffrey, the”
critic laureate,” called him), and some grievous and unquestionable
blemishes. As a narrative, moreover, it tails off into a highly complicated
and exacting plot. It was followed by a long rest at Broadstairs before
Dickens returned to the native home of his genius, and early in 1849
“began to prepare for David Copperfield.”

Of all my books,”
Dickens wrote, “I like this the best; like many fond parents I
have my favourite child, and his name is David Copperfield.” In
some respects it stands to Dickens in something of the same relation
in which the contemporary Pendennis stands to Thackeray. As in that
book, too, the earlier portions are the best. They gained in intensity
by the autobiographical form into which they are thrown; as Thackeray
observed, there was no writing against such power. The tragedy of Emily
and the character of Rosa Dartle are stagey and unreal; TJ’riah
Heep is bad art; Agnes, again, is far less convincing as a consolation
than Dickens would have us believe; but these are more than compensated
by the wonderful realization of early boyhood in the book, by the picture
of Mr Creakie’s school, the Peggottys, the inimitable Mr Micawber,
Betsy Trotwood and that monument of selfish misery, Mrs Gummidge.

At the end of March
1850 commenced the new twopenny weekly called Household Words, which
Dickens planned to form a direct means of communication between himself
and his readers, and as a means of collecting around him and encouraging
the talents of the younger generation. No one was better qualified than
he for this work, whether we consider his complete freedom from literary
jealousy or his magical gift of inspiring young authors. Following the
somewhat dreary and incoherent Bleak House of 1852, Hard Times (1854)—an
anti-Manchester School tract, which Ruskin regarded as’Dickens’s
best work—was the first long story written for Household Words.
About this time Dickens made his final home at Gad’s Hill, near
Rochester, and put the finishing touch to another long novel published
upon the old plan, Little Dorrit (1855’—1857). In spite
of the exquisite comedy of the master of the Marshalsea and the final
tragedy of the central figure, Little Dorrit is sadly deficient in the
old vitality, the humour is often a mock reality, and the repetition
of comic catch-words and overstrung similes and metaphors is such as
to affect the reader with nervous irritation. The plot and characters
ruin each other in this amorphous production. The Tale of Two Cities,
commenced in All the Year Round (the successor of Household Words) in
1859, is much better: the main characters are powerful, the story genuinely
tragic, and the atmosphere lurid; but enormous labour was everywhere
expended upon the construction of stylistic ornament.

The Tale of Two
Cities was followed by two finer efforts at atmospheric delineation,
the best things he ever did of this kind: Great Expectations (186I),
over which there broods the mournful impression of the foggy marshes
of the Lower Thames; and Our Mutual Friend (1864—1865), in which
the ooze and mud and slime of Rotherhithe, its boatmen and loafers,
are made to pervade the whole book with cumulative effect. The general
effect produced by the stories is, however, very different. In the first
case, the foreground was supplied by autobiographical material of the
most vivid interest, and the lucidity of the creative impulse impelled
~him to write upon this occasion with the old simplicity, though with
an added power. Nothing therefore, in the whole range of Dickens surpassed
the early chapters of Great Expectations in perfection of technique
or in mastery of all the resources of the novelist’s art. To have
created Abel Magwitch alone is to be a god indeed, says Mr Swinburne,
among the creators of deathless men. Pumblechook is actually better
and droller and truer to imaginative life than Pecksniff; Joe Gargery
is worthy to have been praised and loved at once by Fielding and by
Sterne: Mr Jaggers and his clients, Mr Wemmick and his parent and his
bride, are such figures as Shakespeare, when dr~pping out of poetry,
might have created, if his lot had been cast in a later century. “Can
as much be said,” Mr Swinburne boldly asks, “for the creatures
of any other man or god?”

In November 1867
Dickens made a second expedition to America, leaving all the writing
that he was ever to complete behind him. He was to make a round sum
of money, enough to free him from all embarrassments, by a long series
of exhausting readings, commencing at the Tremont Temple, Boston, on
the 2nd of December. The strain of Dickens’s ordinary life was
so tense and so continuous that it is, perhaps, rash to assume that
he broke down eventually under this particular stress; for other reasons,
however, his persistence in these readings, subsequent to his return,
was strongly deprecated by his literary friends, led by the arbitrary
and relentless Forster. It is a long testimony to Dickens’s self-restraint,
even in his most capricious and despotic moments, that he never broke
the cord of obligation which bound him to his literary mentor, though
sparring matches between them were latterly of frequent occurrence.
His farewell reading was given on the 15th of March 1870, at St James’s
Hall. He then vanished from “those garish lights,” as he
called them, “for evermore.” Of the three brief months that
remained to him, his last book, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, was the
chief occupation. It hardly promised to become a masterpiece (Longfellow’s
opinion) as did Thackeray’s Denis Duval, but contained much fine
descriptive technique, grouped round a scene of which Dickens had an
unrivalled sympathetic knowledge.

In March and April
1870 Dickens, as was his wont, was mixing in the best society; he dined
with the prince at Lord Houghton’s and was twice at court, once
at a long deferred private interview with the queen, who had given him
a presentation copy of her Leaves from a Journal of our Life in the
Highlands with the inscription “From one of the humblest of authors
to one of the greatest “; and who now begged him on his persistent
refusal of any other title to accept the nominal distinction of a privy
councillor. He took for four months the Milner Gibsons’ house
at 5 Hyde Park Place, opposite the Marble Arch, where he gave a brilliant
reception on the 7th of April. His last public appearance was made at
the Royal Academy banq’uet early in May.

He returned to his
regular methodical routine of work at Gad’s Hill on the 3oth of
May, and one of the last instalments he wrote of Edwin Drood contained
an ominous speculation as to the next two people to die at Cloisterham:
“Curious to make a guess at the two, or say at one of the two.”
Two letters bearing the wellknown superscription” Gad’s
Hill Place, Higham by Rochester, Kent “are dated the 8th of June,
and, on the same Thursday, after a long spell of writing in the Chalet
where he habitually wrote, he collapsed suddenly at dinner. Startled
by the sudden change in the colour and expression of his face, his sister-in-law
(Miss Hogarth) asked him if he was ill; he said “ Yes, very ill,”
but added that he would finish dinner and go on afterwards to London.
“ Come and lie down,” she entreated; “Yes, on the
ground,” he said, very distinctly; these were the last words he
spoke, and he slid from her arms and fell upon the floor. He died at
6-jo P.M. on Friday, the 9th of June, and was buried privately in Poets’
Corner, Westminster Abbey, in the early morning of the I4th of June.
One of the most appealing memorials was the drawing by his “new
illustrator” Luke Fildes in the Graphic of “The Empty Chair;
Gad’s Hill: ninth of June, 1870.” “Statesmen, men
of science, philanthropists, the acknowledged benefactors of their race,
might pass away, and yet not leave the void which will be caused by
the death of Charles Dickens “(The Times). In his will he enjoined
his friends to erect no monument in his honour, and directed his name
and dates only to be inscribed on his tomb, adding this proud provision,
“I rest my claim to the remembrance of my country on my published
works.”

Dickens had no artistic
ideals worth speaking about. The sympathy of his readers was the one
thing he cared about and, like Cobbett, he went straight for it through
the avenue of the emotions. In. personality, intensity and range of
creative genius he can hardly be said to have any modern rival. His
creations live, move and have their being about us constantly, like
those of Homer, Virgil, Chaucer, Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Bunyan,
Moliere and Sir Walter Scott. As to the books themselves, the backgrounds
on which these mighty figures are projected, they are manifestly too
vast, too chaotic and too unequal ever to become classics. Like most
of the novels constructed upon the unreformed model of Smollett and
Fielding, those of Dickens are enormous stock-pots into which the author
casts every kind of autobiographical experience, emotion, pleasantry,
anecdote, adage or apophthegm. The fusion is necessarily very incomplete
and the hotch-potch is bound to fall to pieces with time. Dickens’s
plots, it must be admitted, are strangely unintelligible, the repetitions
and stylistic decorations of his work exceed all bounds, the form is
unmanageable and insignificant. The diffuseness of the English novel,
in short, and its extravagant didacticism cannot fail to be most prejudicial
to its perpetuation. In these circumstances there is very little fiction
that will stand concentration and condensation so well as that of Dickens.

For these reasons
among others our interest in Dickens’s novels as integers has
diminished and is diminishing. But, on the other hand, our interest
and pride in him as a man and as a representative author of his age
and nation has been steadily augmented and is still mounting. Much of
the old criticism of his work, that it was not up to a sufficiently
high level of art, scholarship or gentility, that as an author he is
given to caricature, redundancy and a shameless subservience to popular
caprice, must now be discarded as irrelevant.

As regards formal
excellence it is plain that Dickens labours under the double disadvantage
of writing in the least disciplined of all literary genres in the most
lawless literary milieu of the modern world, that of Victorian England.
In spite of these defects, which are those of masters such as Rabelais,
Hugo and Tolstoy, the work of Dickens is more and more instinctively
felt to be true, original and ennobling. It is already beginning to
undergo a process of automatic sifting, segregation and crystallization,
at the conclusion of which it will probably occupy a larger segment
in the literary consciousness of the English-spoken race than ever before.

Portraits of Dickens,
from the gay and alert “ Boz “of Samuel Lawrence, and the
self-conscious, rather foppish portrait by Maclise which served as frontispiece
to Nicholas Nickleby, to the sketch of him as Bobadil by C. R. Leslie,
the Drummond and Ary Scheffer portraits of middle age and the haggard
and drawn representations of him from- photographs after his shattering
experiences as a public entertainer from 1856 (the year of his separation
from his wife) onwards, are reproduced in Kitton, in Forster and Gissing
and in the other biographies. Sketches are also given in niost of the
books of his successive dwelling places at Ordnance Terrace and 18 St
Mary’s Place, Chatham; Bayham Street, Camden Town; 15 Furnival’s
Inn; 48 Doughty Street; I Devonshire Terrace, Regent’s Park; Tavistock
House, Tavistock Square; and Gad’s Hill Place. The manuscripts
of all the novels, with the exception of the Tale of Two Cities and
Edwin Drood, were given to Forster, and are now preserved in the Dyce
and Forster Museum at South Kensington. The work of Dickens was a prize
for which publishers naturally contended both before and after his death.
The first collective edition of his works was begun in April 1847, and
their number is now very great. The most complete is still that of Messrs
Chapman & Hall, the original publishers of Pickwick; others of special
interest are the Harrap edition, originally edited by F. G. Kitton;
Macmillan’s edition with original illustrations and introduction
by Charles Dickens the younger; and the edition in the World’s
Classics with introductions by G. K. Chesterton. Of the translations
the best known is that done into French by Lorain, Pichot and others,
with B. H. Gausseron’s excellent Pages Choisies (1903).